Telling Stories to the Sea

I bought Afropea 3: Telling Stories to the Sea in 1995, while I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. I discovered this CD via a "world music" listening station at the Tower Records on the Drag. (Sadly, that Tower is no longer with us.) I was drawn to this album because of its interesting cover art (there's a hole punched straight through the middle of the book) and because it was on the Luaka Bop label, which I had already learned to love for its Brazil Classics series (more posts to come on this later).

Listening to the first track through the station's falling-to-pieces headphones, I was hypnotized by the completely foreign atmosphere that enveloped me. I'm sure this song, "Mona Ki Ngi Xica" by Bonga, was probably recorded in some bright, clean studio in Portugal, but in my mind it was (and still is) a few guys sitting on an old, ramshackle deck somewhere looking out over the dark, midnight sea seen on the CD cover, lightly slapping hand drums and rocking back and forth to the restless, climbing-but-never-getting-any-higher bassline. The translated title is "The Child I'm Leaving Behind." The atmosphere could not possibly get any thicker.

I would lie in bed listening to this album, reading the liner notes and staring at the pictures of earlobes, frying pans and bathroom sinks. One picture, that accompanied the lyrics to a song called "Mama Africa" by Dany Silva, affected me more than the others. As far as I can tell, or imagine, what I'm seeing in this image is fishing boats off a distant African coast. Now, I may feel a dryness in my throat and a lightness in my stomach when I listen to "Mama Africa" while looking at that picture, but I know very well that I'm a spoiled white kid from Dallas, Texas, and the romantic feeling would disappear like smoke the second I set foot on one of those African fishing boats. But the feeling is inescapable anyway.

Tolkien (yes, I know I'm a dork) said, "The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft."

I wrote a song a while back about the Dallas neighborhood I grew up in (as far away from the sea as you can get), and the last verse goes:

The sun sets over West Commerce Street
And old Oak Cliff bakes in the heat
And all you hear’s the chickens and the goats
But the ocean lies around the bend
And in my bed at the long day’s end
I can hear the bells ring on the boats